MY CHOICE OF BOOKS
Stanley Long shares five books that are helping him in ministry.
Stanley B. Long
January 1, 1981
"I read in airports-waiting for appointments-before I go to bed. Sometimes I'll thumb through a book, and if it grabs me, I'll run with it."
Last year I read Jim Conway's Men In Midlife Crisis (David C. Cook). Experiencing some very painful midlife problems myself, it seemed as though Conway were speaking directly to me. At the same time, I began to recognize how extensively a midlife crisis affects both Christian and nonChristian men. The workaholic, the affair, the marriage knot, the fading and dying dream-are presented in a fashion that obligates the reader to see fragments of his own experiences scattered throughout Conway's thoughts. He tells how midlife personality changes of a husband can devastate the wife. She has looked to him for leadership, and suddenly he is unable to function as the leader. He wants to lead, yet he feels he must turn to her for security. In Conway's words, "He is like a sailboat caught in a deep fog offshore, without a compass and without wind to move him even if he wanted to go." The book provides practical solutions for dealing with midlife crisis; but it was even more of an aid to me in identifying problems in my life, which I thought were spiritual, as those shared by many men going through this period.
I was again sensitized to ghetto life by reading Home Is a Dirty Street (Third World Press, Chicago) by Eugene Perkins. The author paints a realistic portrait of what it's like to grow up in the ghetto. Kids there never have the opportunity to just enjoy life; they have to learn how to defend themselves, how to fight, and how to survive. When the street is the home, a sixteen-year-old is really twenty-one in terms of experience. Perkins graphically discusses the kind of language ghetto children ...
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